Mountain Part 16

"Yes.... Very much."

The talk strayed gently to less personal matters. The moon-glow from a street lamp drizzling through gray-green leaves fell upon her shoulder; the smooth meeting, at the nape of her neck, between s.h.i.+ning chestnut hair and glowing flesh caught and held his attention; he wanted to lean over and kiss it--harshly--as he would have kissed Dorothy. What would this girl do? What would she say? She did not dislike him, evidently; and he found her not only holding a deeper, more restful physical charm than the other woman, but also possessed of a mental kins.h.i.+p that he met for the first time in the other s.e.x. Why, at times her impressions seemed even maturer than his own. How could his thoughts dare to link inch-deep Dorothy and this girl together!... But a kiss? No, he had done enough of casual loving; he would keep Jane's body inviolate even from the touch of his lips, until they were ready for the final mating....

Why not, if she would have him? What pitiful things, beside her, had been pert-tongued Virginia, Nellie Tolliver, and the rest! A madonna in face, a woman worthy of all life's adorations.... How astonis.h.i.+ng was life, that had flung them together, when he might have missed this dearest hour that he had yet known!

Jane's thoughts, too, were busier than her words. He was attractive, she had at once decided, when measured beside the superficial trousered creatures, "positively not gra.s.shoppers," that smirked their way through Adamsville society; but he was young, very young, in his ideas--his brain still swimming in the haze of third-hand opinions which his father had inherited from slave-wealthy forbears. Men cherished easy mental ruts grooved by the unprogressive centuries; pioneering paths were only for the few. Pelham Judson looked hopeful; no more. Yet there was a distinguis.h.i.+ng, cordial charm in his courtesy; it was not all lip-service. Poor kid! With a father like Paul Judson, and a mother swathed in old prejudices like a Memphian mummy in binding cerements--how could he be expected even to see beyond his fortuitous rut? The brief age of miracles had pa.s.sed. But he was a nice boy; and with a different mother.... Perhaps she could do a little mothering herself; but she must be careful not to let him take her too seriously; or take her at all, she smiled to herself. She had boasted to Dorothy that her husband must be progressive, or pliable; Pelham seemed neither.

And yet he would not make such a bad appearance. Clean looking, athletic, and the son of a Judson--he would not have to be explained away or apologized for. It would be a positive charity to keep him out of the clutches of the usual Adamsville girl, her brain a frica.s.see of bridge scores and dancing dates. She smiled lazily as she reflected that he would take to mothering; his curly hair begged to be smoothed and tousled. Well, she would give it a yank or two; it would serve Dorothy right.

While their words skimmed jerkily above the subjects in which they were really interested, and their thoughts weighed, appraised, and at times depreciated, more deeply, an even more underlying, more ancient set of forces were at work. Eyes talk a language that thoughts would deny; certain proximities bind closer than the unthinking iron to the insensate magnet; above and below speech and meditation, unseen selves meet, measure, and mate, dragging tardy consciousness into situations it thinks are of its planning. These calls and greetings date back of life's long blundering on the harsh land, back to the life-cradling sea: they speak with the unconscious weight of slow millenniums of mindless love. They are kin to the cord that binds the falling apple to the earth, the earth to the sun, the sun to the far starry outposts of the visible universe, and it to the invisible majesty beyond. The infinite pull of material attraction does not sleep: nor do these forces tire of their ancient tasks. Love, rooted deep in life, and born of older ties, does not cease its endless search, its tenacious intangible clasp of what it needs to round its unique need into a blent ecstasy.

There are those who deny romance to a love kin to gravitation and issue of insect matings. They are this far right, that romance is a late by-blow of the ageless creative hunger.

Pelham took Jane back conscientiously shortly after eleven. They had not mentioned the mining situation. The silent hours after their parting were full of the subtle working of those hidden forces whose power they had begun to feel, there upon the narrow coping above the little park.

X

The next morning, Pelham put in a requisition at the library for the book he had commenced. Within the week he received it.

It was thrilling reading--setting at war, in each chapter, his keen mind, which approved at once of its unanswerable insight, and his emotions and prejudices, which balked and struggled against the shattering, one by one, of their ancient idols. It was slow reading: he would finish a chapter, the greater part of him ready to scoff at its conclusions, which must be based upon sophistries; and then, to detect the latent fallacies, he would go over it at once, and find that the rereading merely riveted the intellectual effect the first perusal had produced.

And yet his emotions did not lag far behind his mental acceptance. He saw again, and more clearly, that he had come to a parting of the paths in his thinking and being; the past months had inevitably brought him to this. What did other people think of these matters, if they knew of them at all? What would his father think? Again and again he told himself that Paul must accept these obvious, scintillating conclusions from undeniable premises; but a deeper voice, which yielded a sterner satisfaction, reminded that the economic upset--the socialism--expounded here was in direct opposition to all that his father incarnated. The chasm that had split him from Paul was no new thing; it bedded in childhood antipathies, in petty, intangible causes, in dislike at the elder's uneven rigor of discipline, in a deep-seated resistance against being molded to fit the father's pattern, rather than according to his own leanings.

If his father would come with him, well and good; if not, the son at least would be intellectually honest, and right!

There was no doubt in his mind but that Mary, the essence of motherly understanding, would go with him in these new ways.

He finished the rereading with a sense of physical exhaustion, as if the inner conflicts had shaken his bodily balance. With this was a false sense that these must have always been his thoughts--the things that had seeded and sprouted just below his consciousness. How could he have overlooked them so long? The obvious explanation, that they had not been there, did not occur; and he would have denied it, if it had been called to his attention.

A night's tossing wakefulness induced a different mood. The spirit-tiring reading became unreal and inconclusive; he had strayed off after a marsh-light dancing over the morbid swamps of his emotional imagination. Further reading would purge this from his system.

The librarian obligingly pointed out the rest of the scanty shelf-end of socialist books. Ah, these would correct his wandering! There were Engel's "Origin of the Family," a treatise by Bax that he could not unravel, a rebound "Communist Manifesto," Blatchford's "Merrie England,"

the first volume of "Capital," in the Swan Sonnenschein edition.

Eliminating the Bax book, he began to go conscientiously through the others; the task opened into a joyful journey. The persuasive structure that Wells had erected found b.u.t.tresses and foundations. There was no longer room for carping or delay--he was convinced; more than that, he was stirred by an inner storm, he heard an evangelical trumpeting such as must have overwhelmed Saul in the blinding reproach along the road to Damascus, he acknowledged a las.h.i.+ng command to spend himself for the splendid achievement of this immense dream, nay, this reality that was even now inevitably growing and strengthening throughout the whole man-sown planet.

He sent in an order for these books, and many others referred to. His mind was in a glorified glamor of dynamic thinking.

Was it possible that people could still be unaware of these vast truths?

In college he had had two courses in cla.s.sical economy; but the subjects had left his mind more bewildered than before. Now a vast searchlight cut apart the darkness; the hazy night was as definite as day.

He tried to simplify to himself what he had learned.

Wealth--all wealth--was the product of labor. That, and nothing else.

Rent, interest, profit--labor, human labor, produced them. It was not the land, or money, or factories; it was the toilers, sweating at their tasks, who made all of these, and who received for their toil a miserly fragment. Land, left idle, produced nothing; even natural products were worthless until man's fathering work gave them value. Money--gold calved no golden offspring, bills sp.a.w.ned no further bills as interest.

Factories and machines produced nothing, until man's sweat and blood were poured out over them. Labor was the producer of everything; in justice, all should belong to labor.

War itself, modern, "civilized" war, was a poison exuded by world-greedy capitalism. The withheld product of labor could not be obtained by the needy toilers, nor consumed by the overfed masters; thus backward foreign markets were a necessity, to get rid of the product the system confiscated and prohibited at home. Out of this grew clas.h.i.+ng imperialisms, and wars ... like this present one.

And here was a vast body of men--he reread Jack London's "Revolution" to get the marvelous figures again--throughout every country in the world, with a future planned upon unchangeable, irresistible economic laws, striving everywhere to bring about economic justice and permanent peace.

And he had stayed out of it so long!

Slaves had gone, and serfs had gone, but the wage-slaves, the slaves of the machines, these remained. They must be their own Lincoln, and free themselves; their own Christ, redeeming their posterity.... Kings had gone; money kings must go.

He had called himself a Democrat: by G.o.d, he would be a real one!

Some intuition sent him again to "The Food of the G.o.ds"; after rereading it, the inner excitement drove him out of restricting walls to the ampler stretches of the night.... This, then, the flash came, was the key to Wells' cryptic symbolism! The food of Hercules--the Heraklaphorbia--this was an intellectual food, an idea, that raised men to a height eight times higher than their fellows. He felt his own head in the clouds. He had tasted of the food; he felt a sense of bodily elation, as he pondered in the starry silence of the crest, high above the sleeping city--a sensation of physical magnificence, as if his body towered already above his father's, his mother's, the miners'.

The world of men was asleep, sodden, dead to the splendor of the truth that shone brilliantly throughout it. He felt kin to the stars, the night, the vast mountain that sustained him. The full force of the newspaper verse that he had clipped some days before, and carried around with him, held his mind; he had grown into its mood. The lines obtruded themselves in fragmentary fas.h.i.+on:

Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me, The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone; I hear the voices of the hill and sea; I talk with them, in language all our own.

Over the fields of heaven the stars are sown, Vast s.h.i.+ning ones, who fling their melody To those whose ears can catch the brave clear tone.

Like calls to like; the high stars sing for me.

Stirred by the whirling stars, wild-tongued and free, The winds out of the far-sky realms are blown, Chanting their boisterous rebel litany; The harsh rude breezes speak to me alone....

And then toward the end,

Flesh of their flesh am I, bone of their bone, Blood-brother to them all eternally.

All things are one with me, and we are grown One in our speech, our sadness, our high glee....

This was the boisterous rebel speech, this the message that they had been trying so long to tell him. This was the answer to his soul-hunger for an answer to life's unresting questionings.

Men, women, children--the iron city, the world--staggered blindly on, pulled here and there by vast laws which they did not guess. There was enough and to spare for all; there was plenty, plenty, only for the taking, for all of the children of men. There could be, if men would but have it, G.o.d's kingdom upon earth.... He felt a strange sense of reverence. Life was sweet to him, it had given him the answer to these things.

The following Friday--it was the fourth time he had seen Jane, and the third evening with her--he tacked the talk around to this theme that had so grown upon him in these brief iconoclastic days. The drowsy throb of his motor left the mountain far behind; shot over the creaking wooden bridge that unbarred Shadow Creek, traversed the graveyard glimmer of the moon-mottled sandstone above Shadow Mountain, and now purred and loitered through a further farm-broken valley, nosing toward the East, where the stars rose.

"You know, Jane, I finished that Wells book ... the one I saw first on your table."

"You liked it?" He could feel a smile in the quiet query.

A playful accusation answered her. "You didn't tell me to read it!"

"I knew you would find it for yourself."

He thought this over. "That was better. Tell me, Jane: are you a socialist?"

"Mm ... yes, of course; all sensible people are."

"A member of the party?"

"I've never joined, though I've heard Kate O'Hare, and some of the local 'comrades' speak. And I went to the Debs meeting last fall."

So she was a socialist--one of the despised, reviled believers in the newer, finer creed! He had guessed it all along; the certainty as to it had played some part in the pleasure at his own mental choice. Out of a joyed heart he announced, "I'm going to join--at once! I met a member of the Adamsville local--a Mr. Duckworth----"